Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Cine-psychoanalysis 105
essay is concerned with how popular cinema produces and reproduces what she
calls the ‘male gaze’. Mulvey describes her approach as ‘political psychoanalysis’.
Psychoanalytic theory is ‘appropriated . . . as a political weapon [to demonstrate] the
way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ (6).
The inscription of the image of woman in this system is twofold: (i) she is the object
of male desire, and (ii) she is the signifier of the threat of castration. In order to challenge
popular cinema’s ‘manipulation of visual pleasure’, Mulvey calls for what she
describes as the ‘destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon’ (7). She is uncompromising
on this point: ‘It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. This is
the intention of this article’ (8).
So what are the pleasures that must be destroyed? She identifies two. First, there is
scopophilia, the pleasure of looking. Citing Freud, she suggests that it is always more
than just the pleasure of looking: scopophilia involves ‘taking other people as objects,
subjecting them to a controlling gaze’ (ibid.). The notion of the controlling gaze is crucial
to her argument. But so is sexual objectification: scopophilia is also sexual, ‘using
another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’ (10). Although it
clearly presents itself to be seen, Mulvey argues that the conventions of popular cinema
are such as to suggest a ‘hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent
to the presence of the audience’ (9). The audience’s ‘voyeuristic fantasy’ is encouraged
by the contrast between the darkness of the cinema and the changing patterns of
light on the screen.
Popular cinema promotes and satisfies a second pleasure: ‘developing scopophilia
in its narcissistic aspect’ (ibid.). Here Mulvey draws on Lacan’s (2009) account of the
‘mirror stage’ (see earlier section) to suggest that there is an analogy to be made
between the constitution of a child’s ego and the pleasures of cinematic identification.
Just as a child recognizes and misrecognizes itself in the mirror, the spectator recognizes
and misrecognizes itself on the screen. She explains it thus:
The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his
motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that
he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences
his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image
recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as
superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject,
which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification
with others (9–10).
Her argument is that popular cinema produces two contradictory forms of visual
pleasure. The first invites scopophilia; the second promotes narcissism. The contradiction
arises because ‘in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the
subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification
of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination
with and recognition of his like’ (10). In Freudian terms, the separation is between
‘scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object)’ and